We work with a few marketing agencies. Usually, they’re not able to figure out the technical elements or the technical requirements for different projects or implementations. Then they need a partner like Optimum7.
Technical Challenges for Marketing And PR Agencies
What is the challenge for marketing agencies out there?
If you’re a marketing agency, you might be offering search engine optimization, social media, or paid searches. If you’re doing any kind of PR, again, you’re offering paid placements or you’re offering specific media publications, or even perhaps TV, to feature your clients to the TV program, on different TV stations. What are the challenges for marketing agencies when it comes to technical development?
They’re going to run into multiple challenges. Those obstacles vary based on the executions they’re running for that client. So let’s say you’re running SEO for a client of yours. One important SEO aspect is site speed. However, you might not have a developer that knows how to go into the code and compress the CSS, defer, and compress JavaScript and optimize all of the images at scale. Marketing agencies run into these problems when they don’t have a partnership with a development agency.
Marketing And Web Development Partnerships
If you’re running any type of paid campaigns across multiple channels, are you tracking all of that information properly? Are your pixels firing properly? Do you have tag managers set up and are the code set up the way that it should be? These are just a few of the many challenges that we’ve had agencies come to us with.
The work needs to be finished. More than seven years ago, technical elements were not as strong and they were not integrated. Nowadays, if you want to do Facebook ads for a client of yours, check that the code and Facebook pixels are implemented, the conversions are defined, and the analytics are set up. If you are dealing with a B2B client, make sure the conversions are tracked, the phone calls are tracked with dynamic insertion or whatever technology you’re using, or maybe different session IDs. So it becomes difficult.
If you’re an SEO agency, you need to do technical implementations and pay attention to ad-speed. If an SEO, paid search or a social media agency does ads for your clients and a potential partner lacks a technical team, programmers, backend and front end engineers, two-way engineers, or business analysts, why hire them? You could build those departments, create a program or hire backend developers,
The hiring process for a developer is extremely tedious. Finding a developer that can actually do what they say they can do is very difficult. It can take months to actually find an individual that’s capable of doing that. At the end of the day, you still need to test them out and vet them out. You’re still unsure of their capabilities.
Finding a Reputable Web Development Partner
However, partnering with an agency that’s well-established with a track record delivers quality and performance. There’s no trial and error at this moment in time. When you have great relationships with long-term clients, you don’t want to tarnish that relationship by risking it with an outsourced developer or a freelance developer.
Nowadays marketing has become technical and integrated. We’ve had prospects reach out and explain, “A client asked me about this technical work with Shopify Plus, they wanted to update something on the checkout of Shopify Plus. I found this guy on Upwork and he broke the Shopify Plus code, he broke the checkout, he deleted some stuff by mistake.” Clients file a suit because their website or checkout was down for a few days and they lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Do you really want to jeopardize that? Anybody could go to Upwork and find somebody for ten dollars an hour. What does that do for your reputation or quality of work? Optimum7 bills $200 an hour because it includes the QA quality assurance, business analyst, project manager, director, and coordinator.
You can’t do development with just one program. Furthermore, programmers are a different breed of individuals. A talented programmer is not going to work as the only programmer in the company because he’s aware that everything’s going to come back to him. The single requests and programmers don’t want to do design. If you are not aware of the structure of a development team, you’re going to burn your people out even if you try to build that department.
It takes $300,000 a year to build this department at the minimum. Don’t even attempt that. And are you a developer or are you code-savvy yourself? Because you have to have your own onboarding processes to vet these individuals and make sure that they know what they’re talking about, they know what they say they know.
Building Mutually Beneficial Relationships Between Marketing & Development Agencies
A few weeks ago, the team received a sizable project. This individual, this prospect was looking for specific marketing executions, which we do, but it’s again, it’s coming from an agency. When marketers get referrals from an agency, they don’t touch the marketing part. However, the client also wanted a very custom marketplace implementation and our engineers were the ones who actually quoted that.
During this process, you need sales engineers like Optimum7 on the phone when talking to a client. It builds authority.
Why would Optimum7 increase the odds of closing that sale?
It’s very difficult to sell a service that you’ve never done before. Optimum7 has closed hundreds of these development projects. The developers know how to close those deals because they know what the project needs from start to finish. The team establishes that authority in that conversation.
When you involve Optimum7 staff and sales engineers you build that authority. The prospect feels more confident, not only about your marketing capabilities. They are also saying, “Well, this company brought this development team and these guys know what they’re talking about.” This is not only about marketing or development or backend or front development, this is also about business application.
At Optimum7, the managers know the business application of actual functionality and how it’s going to work in the real world. The odds of you closing that sale from a prospect or a client that is asking for something technical is a lot higher if you involve sales engineers like Optimum7 because we’ve done this 100s of times before.
What is a digital marketing relationship?
When partnering with agencies out there, marketing agencies and the in-house team divide marketing into three aspects: SEO, social and paid or PR agencies or even business coaches, we work with some business coaches.
The marketers first sign an NDA. Then the partners talk in a meeting, to understand how to work together as well as methods of operation before reaching an agreement. If you want to white label your partner, the team has no problem with that. If you want to the team to show more transparency to your client, again, that is doable.
Everyone wants a mutually beneficial relationship. An ideal partnership is a win-win-win for Optimum7 as well as your agency, business, client, or prospect. Everybody gets value out of a relationship.
Marketers know that paid SEO, PR, increased website visitors or higher traffic aren’t enough anymore. Look at the bottom line. Conversion rate optimization comes into play then.
Many firms and agencies say, “We’re driving tons of traffic to their platform. However, they’re not converting. We’re having tons of people drop out of the sales funnel once they get to the checkout page.” You need an expert developer to come in and identify what can be done from a technology standpoint to streamline that process and increase their conversions. So, that’s another huge benefit that we offer to a lot of marketing agencies that have had success on the traffic but have kind of come up short on the conversion and revenue side.
Everyone needs to benefit from the relationship. The Optimum7 team knows how integrations with technical expertise, marketing, PR, and business coaching work. We’ve worked with multiple partners before in the same manner that we’re explaining to you.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us. We’ll talk to you next week.
